Comics and cartoon characters featured in illustrated history about the Declaration of Independence

The Orange County Register interviewed cartoonist R. Sikoryak about a new GN titled Declaration/Emancipation Illustrated, which builds specially on use of comics and cartoon characters for exploration of the famous moment in USA history when independence was set in motion in the 18th century:

As he worked on an adaptation of some of America’s essential documents over the past few years, cartoonist R. Sikoryak says one element of the ongoing American experiment became clear.

[...] His new book, “Declaration / Emancipation Illustrated,” combines the complete texts of the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Gettysburg Address and illustrates them with characters and scenes from comic books, comic strips and animated films and TV series, including The Simpsons, My Little Pony, Black Panther, Ziggy, the Powerpuff Girls and more.

“People identify with cartoon characters,” says Sikoryak, who skillfully takes on the styles of everything from The Family Circus to Family Guy. “I like that interplay of familiar characters with important texts.”

And sharp-eyed readers will recognize reworkings of iconic comic book panels, including “The New Teen Titans,” “The Invaders” and “The Savage Sword of Conan.”

“I was strictly using American characters, U.S. characters,” he says about some of the restrictions he gave himself for the artwork. “They’re all characters created by, or who represent America in some way. So that was the rule for the book.”

I would assume it's done under licensed permit, but this is a creative way to make use of other known creations for producing a GN about American history, and a lot more than what you see in the actual mainstream today.

Q. Your book is an illustrated version of the Declaration of Independence, Emancipation Proclamation, and Gettysburg Address. How do you describe this kind of hybrid?

I grew up making comics and reading lots of comics, and I’ve tried to find ways to take my skills and use them in an interesting way. I used to do strictly literary adaptations, where I would take novels, and I would retell them as comics in different styles, kind of like what I’m doing now,

You could call it a graphic novel, you could call it an illustrated book, but basically, I just like taking the history I love from comics and combining it with texts that I think are important or interesting for people to reevaluate in new ways.

It's certainly pleasant news in an era where patriotic values have been largely rejected by mainstream leftists who don't show any appreciation for themes like "truth, justice and the American way" in Superman, for example, and likely don't celebrate American patriotism in Captain America either.

Q. There can be a friction between people who believe that if you love something, you can also have fun with it, versus those who don’t. Is that challenging to navigate?

I have a certain earnest streak to me, and I think that comes through in the work. Certainly, I will throw in some jokes here and there, but for the most part — there’s some editorializing, I suppose, in some of the image choices — but I am really keeping the text there. I’m not commenting in the text. If you just read the text, there’s nothing in the book that isn’t in the original document.

I’m really trying to be faithful to all my sources, whether it’s what Thomas Jefferson wrote or if it’s what Seth MacFarlane drew for “Family Guy,” I’m trying to represent the perspective of both sides — or the many sides.

One of the reasons I wanted to use the different styles is because you can find a page that feels very patriotic, and it feels kind of solemn, and then there’ll be another page that’s maybe a little absurd, or a little funny, or a little ironic, but that’s the tapestry of America. I really wanted people to feel like something in this would represent them.

In the best sense of what I think the country is, it’s all these people coming together — I know some people don’t think that’s what it is — but in my estimation, it’s really about all these people coming together, that’s kind of what the book represents. You could find specific pages that are nothing but solemn, but there is a certain, I hope, thrill, or as you say, friction, in the combination of all these things next to each other.

The question is whether he ultimately respects what the Declaration of Independence was for, which is why we need to hope the part about "reevaluation" only means whether most believe it's acceptable to employ notable creations from past franchises for a new GN about an historical milestone. Same can be said about the view of "both sides" too.

If the finished product respects patriotic and civilized values, that's what'll make this an admirable project. So if Sikoryak is faithful to those beliefs, then he'll have produced something that can be a breath of fresh air in an era where patriotism's sadly been diminished by leftist ideologies, and this needs to be challenged by showing the courage to present patriotism as a positive value again.

More signs it's looking bad for the live action Supergirl film

The reviews are in, and according to Warner Todd Huston at Breitbart, even leftist trade journals like Variety are appalled with the new live action take on Supergirl, describing it as follows:

Even the left-wing Hollywood press is turning against Warner Bros’ new summer superhero tent pole, Supergirl, calling the film “super-horrendous” with the “worst script” ever.

The review by Variety’s Owen Gleiberman was quite negative ahead of the film’s worldwide debut coming up on Friday. The Hollywood newser ripped the film as “pretentious” for it’s “punk rock attitude” that is “cringe.”

Gleiberman dismissed the film, writing, “here’s the key thing to know about Supergirl, the second outing from James Gunn’s DC Studios: The entire movie thinks it’s ‘punk rock.'” And that, Gleiberman says, is “cringe.”

“The film introduces us to Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock), who rather than being the spunky Supergirl of legend, saving earthly lives in a primary-colored spandex suit, is an interplanetary drunk in a Blondie T-shirt (how punk rock!), bopping from one arid dystopia to the next,” Gleiberman explained.

What's additionally troubling is how the Girl of Steel's depicted as a drunkard, which Culture Mix talks about some more:

Supergirl spends most of her screen time in the movie being drunk, nearly drunk, or hung over. There are multiple scenes that are meant to make Supergirl into some sort of sad superhero emo girl, who uses alcohol because she’s got inner demons about being an orphan. It’s supposed to make her look sympathetic, but her repetitive drunkenness gets tiresome to watch after a while.

When it's that heavy-handed, something is definitely wrong, right down to how they're forcing Supergirl into the darkness, instead of offering an optimistic vision of a woman who could overcome any trauma she suffered and find happiness again. If this film lacks a sense of humor to boot, that's another major error. And the filmmakers may have screwed up with the following plotlines as well:

A trio of Sklarian raiders (played by blue-costumed Clara Rosager, purple-costumed Heather Agyepong and red-costumed Alice Hewkin) suddenly invade the bus because they want to steal Ruthye’s sword. A massive fight ensues, Supergirl suddenly exerts her superpowers (because she’s on a yellow light planet), and somehow she’s able to get these Sklarian raiders to tell her where Krem is. He’s on a planet where kidnapped girls are being held captive to be forced into marriage to men. For a superhero movie aimed at families, this pedophilia/child trafficking storyline is quite disturbing and might be inappropriate for viewing by children of a certain age.

Similarly, the movie has some murder scenes that are unsettling and sends hypocritical messages about revenge killings. Several times in the movie, Supergirl gets preachy with Ruthye, by lecturing her to not be consumed by vengeful anger because it will rot her soul. Supergirl literally tells Ruthye that killing Krem won’t be the answer to help Ruthie’s emotional pain.

And that’s why it’s a letdown to see what happens to Krem, because it’s the complete antithesis of Supergirl’s moralistic lectures. Why go to the trouble of having Supergirl hold herself up as taking the “high ground,” when she stoops to the level that she does by the end of this movie? The end fate of Krem is just lazy and formulaic. This movie is really trying to be a superhero version of “Mad Max” meets “Game of Thrones,” but the nihilistic themes in “Mad Max” and “Game of Thrones” just don’t work in a “Supergirl” movie.

There's 2 things that can be said about the above: one, the chances the plotline with slave girls is a metaphor for Islam's support for child-trafficking are very slim. Two, if murder scenes are what the screeplay is built upon, that too is pretty alienating. Let's also recall James Gunn, who's one of the producers of this film, turned out to have made some very offensive jokes among other horrific deeds in the past decade, and also injected a repellent metaphor for Israel into last year's Superman film, which is why he's unqualified to explore the aforementioned themes in the movie. At the end of this review, it also notes that:

Don’t expect any mid-credits or any end-credits scenes to hint how this story might continue, because there are no mid-credits or end-credits scenes in “Supergirl,” probably because the filmmakers ran out of ideas for this underwhelming superhero movie. And there’s no better example of how far off the mark “Supergirl” is than the fact that it isn’t until about 80 minutes into this 108-minute movie before Supergirl is seen in her full iconic superhero costume. “Supergirl” spends so much time trying to prove that Supergirl has an identity crisis, the entire story loses its way in its own identity crisis that falls short of what a great “Supergirl” movie should be.

Ah, that's got to be another huge mistake the scriptwriters made: they take forever to show Kara donning her costume - which looks pretty dull in terms of color here - and only so much time depicting her as a drunkard, while her powers oscillate between stronger and weaker in ways that don't avail. The filmmakers also made the unpardonable error of adapting the script of the overrated Tom King's miniseries, and if that's how it's going to be, you can't be shocked when things go into freefall. A leading error in the film's making has to be that the screenwriters didn't have the creative autonomy to develop their own story free of editorial mandates. And it looks like we'll be seeing the sad results soon at the box office.

Once again, as in 1984, the Maid of Might and her creators (Otto Binder and Al Plastino) have been done a terrible injustice. With the worst part being that the filmmakers - and even modern comics writers - are unlikely to apologize for what they've led to, no matter the box office results.

What qualifications does Jim Lee have to say there's too much superhero content?

Popverse says the artist who's been head of DC for years now told a podcast there's too much superhero content on the market:

While speaking to the Masterplan podcast, Lee reminisces on his days as an early superhero fan in the '60s and '70s, when it was harder to keep up with comics and movie and TV adaptations were scarce at best. Though he doesn't call for any kind of reduction in superhero media, he does state his opinion that the large amount of available material makes fans more willing to dismiss material that creators truly cared about making.

"I think when you have fewer choices, you value each choice more. If you are starved of food, when you finally have a meal, it's gonna taste the best that it ever could. When you have a buffet of endless food, you eat something and go 'Meh, that's OK,' and you move onto the next thing. I think that's kind of where we're at with pop culture," Lee explains. "People put their hearts and souls into telling stories, whether it's a comic book, or a big feature film, and people just consume it and move onto the next thing, cause there's so much. In some ways there's almost too much, in my opinion."

It does seem like there has been something of a cultural shift in the attitude of fans about what they see as the waxing and waning of the relative quality of the superhero stories being told in film and TV in particular. From the perspective of someone who has covered the comic industry for nearly 20 years, that seems like the natural course of comic based media and even comic books themselves. We've all had times when we couldn't get enough of a certain character or story, and when we've felt disconnected from most of what we're reading.

Considering Lee dealt with only so much of theme himself, and yet was instrumental in its downfall, it's awfully rich of him to tell us there's too much in the ways of superherodom. In that case, why didn't he ever make a serious attempt to lend his art talents to something different?

And if we refer to modern "creators", if it's writers like Jason Aaron and Al Ewing, I wouldn't say writers like those dedicate themselves to storytelling of the talented kind. You also don't get "minor" characters by today's standards at DC in their own solo books, unless perhaps it's the SJW-pandering creations they concocted 2 decades ago, though most of those have largely vanished of late. I mention that because characters like the Silver Age Atom, Hawkman, Elongated Man and even Firestorm aren't put to use now by DC writers, if at all, and if there's any kind of moratorium imposed by editors after all the damage they caused in the past 2 decades beginning with Identity Crisis, that's wrong.

If there's any cultural shift with fandom, it's abandonment of the mainstream, because they've become the equivalent of sour milk. One can only wonder if Lee will go on to work on something non-superhero related, but after he's long proven he's a failure as a company manager, I wouldn't recommend hiring him for an indie project, no matter how talented he might still be as an artist. To be sure, there are comics fans who realize Lee's an alienating letdown, and it'd be best not to put money into his pockets anymore after he just stood by and allowed the DCU to be ruined by Dan DiDio.

Sugarcoated interview with an IDW editor who's an SJW, and has quite a double standard

Brands Untapped interviewed Heather Antos, a SJW who worked at Marvel as an editor in the past decade and was instrumental in damaging their output the woke way, and now is working at IDW, where she serves as editor on some very eyebrow raising imprints:

Heather Antos, you’ve described yourself as “taller in person, a destroyer of childhoods and a professional geek.” How tall are you?

Ha! I’m 5’10”, which is short in my family.

Is it? Gosh! And ‘destroyer of childhoods we’ll find out more about… Professional geek – lets get into that. What’s your actual job title?

I’m the Senior Group Editor at IDW Publishing. I oversee our crime imprint – which is pretty self-explanatory – and all things IDW Dark; our horror imprint.

Great remit! What kind of things does IDW Dark involve?

That involves our licensed partnerships with Paramount – Event Horizon, Twilight Zone, A Quiet Place, Smile, Sleepy Hollow. It also involves some of our historic, original creator-owned horror titles: 30 Days of Night, Locke & Key, Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees, The Exorcism at 1600 Penn. Over its 26 years, IDW has really made a name for itself as being a home of horror in the comic space.

Very interesting. She had a sex-negative viewpoint when she worked at Marvel - with the biggest irony being her claim of alleged admiration for Flo Steinberg, who served as one of the editors on the Marvel Swimsuit specials - yet years later at IDW, all of a sudden, Antos is quite comfortable working on stories involving violent content, horror and darkness? That she'd boast about being a "destroyer of childhoods" is certainly sad as it's insulting, because that's what she was doing at Marvel, if anywhere, and perhaps also at neo-Valiant.

Hell in space… Tell me if I’m wrong here: my memory is that they filmed a lot more foootage for the Event Horizon movie that got cut because it was too horrific. Are you, in a comic, better positioned to explore the extreme edges of that?

Yes and no. I mean, ratings still exist – so what we’re allowed to show in a comic book still matters. We can’t go too extreme or else the comic itself would need to be polybagged to stop a kid picking it up and chancing across it. So ratings still matter. Also, for licenses like Event Horizon, A Quiet Place, Smile and so on, I’m very aware that those are Paramount franchises. So what we did has to match that brand…

So to your earlier point, about stuff filmed for Event Horizon that you can’t watch today, we can’t exceed that level in the comics That’s the brand! Another example is A Quiet Place… Those films are rated PG-13, so the comics themselves need to match that in terms of language, gore, the types of scares we’re allowed to do and so on. Meanwhile, Smile is rated R – so we can go a little further.

Again, this is quite telling when somebody who had a sex-negative viewpoint at one publisher is perfectly fine working with R-rated mayhem at another. Interesting how she actually brings up concern for what children might stumble over if they picked up a comic with mature themes, which, despite the perception comics aren't read by children today, could happen. But her double-standard on sex as opposed to violence ruins whatever points she's trying to make.

I’m loving this! You were at Marvel before IDW, were you not? What were you working on there?

When the Star Wars line launched in 2015, I helped do that with Jason Aaron, John Cassaday, Kieron Gillen, Salvador Larroca, Mark Waid, Terry Dodson… That was the big, big, BIG launch; around the time that Force Awakens was coming out. I also worked on the Deadpool line around the time that movie was came out. And I co-created the character Gweenpool for Marvel while I was there as well.

And Aaron was one of the biggest SJWs they hired at the time. One could say Gillen was too, considering he wrote the storyline where Tony Stark's background was retconned so he was an adopted orphan instead of having biological parents. And seriously, Antos co-created Gwenpool? Well I'm not impressed with that either. And did she ever apologize to Jae Lee for accusing him of being a Comicsgate supporter? If she ever did, I have yet to find out. Antos later says:

So you can imagine when I learned about comics in my university years, it was just such a cool thing! To know that a group of people got to collaborate together on these projects – and that it wasn’t just superhero stuff! Because, obviously, I grew up with the same superhero TV shows and movies and all the stuff that everyone else did. But when I was in college, I took an American literature course and studied a lot of the classic Vertigo stuff.

Such as?

Oh, I was introduced to The Sandman and Transmetropolitan and Hellblazer and a lot of that material. And I was surprised to find that comics can be horror, they can be crime. They can be so many things away from what most people might assume comics are. [...]

Wonder what she thinks now that the author of the former title was accused of sexual abuse? Or that the author of Transmetropolitan was accused of taking advantage of a number of women by making empty promises he'd help them get jobs in the industry? That she sounds like she's still okay with reading those items can be telling too of where she really stands. Near the end of the interview:

Amazing. I have one last question to wrap things up, Heather… Are there any dream licenses that you’d love to work on?

Oh, there are a couple I’ll happily talk about because I’ve been very vocal about them online! First, I absolutely love Indiana Jones – it’s one of my first loves. Obviously, it’s with Disney, which is in the Marvel wheelhouse so if anything was ever going to happen with Indy, that would be where it would happen. Then, my other love – again, I’m so loud about this online – is James Bond… I absolutely love James Bond, and I don’t think the franchise has had the comic run it deserves.

If she had her way, it definitely wouldn't. As for Indy, wonder what she thinks of how the series was screwed up and totally buried by political correctness? Probably nothing much, alas.

It's interesting to note that a few years ago, according to That Park Place, Antos accused her previous employers at Marvel and Valiant of unfair treatment, suggesting she now holds a grudge against them for discontinuing her employment. Why she got a job with IDW next is mystifying, though her willingness to serve as editor of dark titles does speak volumes. At the same time, the site notes that, based on what they found being told in her business profile:

She has no other job experience aside from being an independent editor and story consultant, which she claims to have been doing since 2016.

So why'd IDW want to hire her? Considering they could be on their last legs now finance-wise, it hardly helps to employ somebody whose "talent" is very unclear. In the past decade, she did little more than work as a SJW, and this only suggests she hasn't changed. Anybody who's going to take the kind of double-standard she does is only making clear why they weren't suited to work in comicdom to begin with. Whatever she's overseeing at IDW doesn't sound appealing, and with her as one of the editors, that's why it's best not to buy what're bound to be overrated horror and crime tales anyway.

A special event for art students at a Massachussettes library

The Greenfield Recorder covered a special project aimed at encouraging children to illustrate comics at a Sunderland library:

For many young readers, comics are a gateway into storytelling. From Monday, June 22, to Friday, June 26, the Sunderland Public Library is helping children take the next step from reading comics to creating their own.

Through a week of comics programming organized in partnership with the Boston Comics Arts Foundation (BCAF), local students will learn directly from professional cartoonists while exploring the fundamentals of visual storytelling. The program features award-winning graphic novelists Jarrett J. Krosoczka and Mike Curato, who will share their experiences as creators and encourage young artists to develop their own voices.

According to Deanna Soukiasian, cartoonist and education coordinator for the Boston Comics Arts Foundation’s Mass Makes Comics initiative, the program grew from a desire to make comics education accessible to more communities.

“In the community, there’s a growing desire for kids to learn visual literacy,” Soukiasian said. “Comics are for everybody, and learning is for everybody.”

Mass Makes Comics focuses on bringing educational opportunities to underfunded communities throughout Massachusetts. By partnering with libraries, artists and families, the organization works to ensure that students who are interested in comics have access to professional instruction regardless of their background.

Well that's great they want to encourage students to try their luck in illustration. But, I hope they recognize the vitality of being a talented artist and writer too, otherwise, how does an aspiring creator expect anybody to read his or her productions? It's also worth considering that if you inject heavy-handed leftist ideology into your work, that too could discourage potential audiences. Provided all involved are willing to consider that, their project and convention should work out well enough.

Why is Absolute Batman so "addictive" to certain mainstream apologists?

Here's a writer at Dread Central who's telling why he allegedly finds Absolute Batman so "addictive":

As most of you regular readers know by now, I’m pretty obsessed with DC‘s record-breaking Absolute Batman. Not because it’s Batman. Not because it’s selling a ridiculous number of copies. Not because every issue seems to create another key appearance or first cameo for collectors to chase. I’m obsessed with it because after more than eighty years of Batman stories, writer Scott Snyder and artist Nick Dragotta somehow found a way to make the character feel new again.

The easiest explanation is Bruce Wayne himself. For decades, Batman has largely been defined by wealth. He was the billionaire who used unlimited resources to wage war on crime, and while that fantasy worked when I was younger, it feels increasingly disconnected from the world we live in now. The idea of a billionaire using his power and influence for good sounds nice, but it’s also become much harder to relate to. This version of Bruce Wayne changes that. He’s blue collar. He’s working class. He isn’t standing above Gotham looking down at its problems. He’s living inside them. He’s a product of the same broken system that created Gotham’s corruption, and he’s fighting back against it.

I'd noticed this stupid defense put to use before, and if there's anything it certainly fails to recognize, it's that there's also such a thing as wish fulfilment. Of course, the same people who apparently don't want Wayne to be a millionaire also don't want Spider-Man to be either, and no doubt, they don't even want Tony Stark to be wealthy. Why, now that I think of it, Matt Murdock as Daredevil was close to being wealthy, if only because for many years, he'd been depicted as well off enough to afford a townhouse with roof window through which he could go out to do acrobatics on his way to patrol as Hornhead. And I guess that's not acceptable to the modern SJW either, because it's all too close to being like Donald Trump, huh? I hesitate to think what they'd say about a woman being wealthy, and IIRC, Vixen's been characterized as such. What would or will they say about a heroine like her being rich?

But the more I’ve thought about Absolute Batman, the more I’ve realized Bruce Wayne is only the entry point. He’s what initially grabs you, but he’s not why you keep coming back month after month. The real magic is the world that Snyder and Dragotta are building around him, and it’s unlike anything I’ve seen in mainstream superhero comics in a very long time.

I miss the part here about merit. Even in later paragraphs, it's not clear that's what they're selling this on. It still sounds more like they're selling it on the alternate universe theme alone, along with darkness. Which is actually what's been the norm for a long time now, and if there's something that hasn't received much emphasis for years now, it's a world that's bright and optimistic, like the Fantastic Four's. So what's the writer lecturing us about anyway?

The book never sits in one place too long. It’ll give you Batman smashing someone’s face through a wall and then immediately cut to Bruce lying in his mother’s arms. It’ll introduce a major villain, answer a question that’s been hanging over the series for months, tease three new mysteries, and somehow still find time for character development. The story is constantly shifting between action, horror, mythology, mystery, and emotional drama without ever feeling bloated or unfocused. [...]

What’s remarkable is that the speed never comes at the expense of character. The same issue can swing from “really bombastic, gross, or insane action,” as Dragotta describes it, directly into deeply personal moments that remind readers why they care about these characters in the first place.

In fact, Dragotta specifically points to those quieter moments as being equally important to the series’ success. While discussing scenes involving Bruce and his mother, he explained how the goal is to create emotional recognition in the reader. “Little Bruce cuddling up to his mom and having a reader goes, yeah, that’s how I used to cuddle with my mom.”

Gee, what's being told here that couldn't be told in similar ways in the flagship comics proper? Also, despite what the columnist says, it's doubtful they made this genuinely character based. Either way, here's the stunning part that could be applied to thousands of other comics, mainstream or otherwise:

That’s the part I think most people miss when they talk about Absolute Batman.

People focus on the oversized Batman. They focus on the action. They focus on the redesigns and the shocking reveals. What makes the book special is that it never loses sight of the people underneath all of it. For every giant action sequence, there’s a character moment. For every revelation about Gotham, there’s a revelation about Bruce. The spectacle gets readers talking, but the emotional core is what keeps them invested.

The closest comparison I can make isn’t another comic. It’s prestige television. Absolute Batman doesn’t feel like a monthly comic book. It feels like a serialized series that expects you to keep up. It expects you to remember details from ten issues ago. It expects you to connect the dots. It expects you to pay attention. Most importantly, it respects the reader enough not to explain everything twice.

Sounds like he's saying it's similar to a movie, which reminds me of the time when author Sean Howe said 14 years ago that if you make the comic look more like a movie, it's a recipe for failure. Doesn't that ever occur to these media phonies? That the horror genre gets such an emphasis here also isn't encouraging, nor is the talk of "gross". How can you get emotionally invested with that kind of nasty theme running amok any more than the divisive political metaphors?

At some point, the magic usually disappears. A creator loses focus. The mythology becomes bloated. Editorial gets involved. The story starts spinning its wheels. I’ve watched it happen for most of my life. So every month when a new issue of Absolute Batman arrives, I find myself staring at it for hours before opening it.

This is getting silly now, despite how some interesting points are made on how and why storytelling goes wrong. If he's going to merely stare for hours at the book he's received, he makes himself sound like a nut. And what good does it do to bring up editorial mandates when the same writers make no attempt to complain that kind of "oversight" has to stop? Or that talent matters and can't be sabotaged by said mandates? Replacing the flagship comics with alternate universe lines doesn't improve anything. It's only defeatist, especially when the excuse is to push more political metaphors that even the mainstream lines aren't immune to. And now, they actually reveal one of the story's most eyebrow raising setups:

One of the biggest developments in the issue revolves around Bruce’s growing realization that his father’s death may not have been random at all. The implication that Scarecrow was involved changes everything, but what impressed me wasn’t the twist itself. It was the realization that evidence of this has been sitting in the series from the very beginning. This wasn’t a surprise invented halfway through the run. It feels planned. It feels intentional. It feels like another example of Snyder and Dragotta trusting that readers are paying attention.

Then comes the skyscraper scene.

Bruce is standing on the ledge of a skyscraper (that he’s building as part of his day job) when his boss arrives with a group of investors. Another figure steps onto the ledge beside him.

It’s Joker.

And for a moment, everything stops.

Not just the story. Everything.

The issue stops. The room stops. The entire universe seems to stop.

Because this isn’t just a character reveal. This is the moment where the mythology expands again. This version of Joker isn’t simply another criminal. He’s a billionaire. A manipulator. A puppet master. A man who increasingly appears to be sitting above Gotham itself, quietly pulling strings from the shadows.

Then comes the bombshell.

He tells Bruce that he made him.

That Scarecrow killing his father wasn’t random.

That Batman isn’t some outside force pushing back against Gotham’s corruption.

He’s a product of it.

He’s another piece on the board.

What makes the scene work isn’t the shock value. It’s the relationship being established between the two of them. The suggestion that they need each other. That neither can fully exist without the other. It’s one of the oldest themes in Batman mythology, yet somehow this version feels fresh. More importantly, it feels earned because the series has spent 21 issues laying track for moments exactly like this.

This doesn't sound appealing. It just sounds stupid. As for the part about a wealthy villain, that's already been noted for some time now, that this comic's take on the Clown Prince of Crime is more like an allusion to Donald Trump. And when it's told Batman was a production of corruption, I'm sorry, but that's only insulting to the intellect, and does nothing to build confidence in the story putting emphasis on a dedicated crimefighter. If this kind of premise were applied to Spider-Man, it wouldn't work there either. What's more, that whole notion the hero and villain literally "need each other" is insulting to the intellect, and reeks of moral equivalence. Seriously, do we need villains as horrific as the Joker is usually characterized as? Of course not. One sure thing: a villain that awful should not be considered more valuable than a hero.

I trust Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta to keep building. I trust them not to waste my time. I trust them not to hit the reset button. I trust them because 21 issues in, they’ve earned it.

Forget it. Snyder didn't do anything worthwhile for Batman when he first wrote the flagship series 15 years ago, And the Absolute line only reeks of pretension. Not to mention that the whole notion hero and villain "need each other" is irritating, and quite possibly one of the biggest problems in marketing and storytelling that brought down Batman as much as Superman years before.

Live action MOTU movie continued to drop in sales

So 2 weeks into its debut, the new Masters of the Universe live action movie still plummeted in sales, as Variety reported:

“Masters of the Universe,” on the other hand, will have a harder time justifying its mega price tag. The sword-and-planet adventure dropped to No. 5 with $8.6 million from 3,677 locations. It has earned just $45.7 million in North America and $84 million worldwide and, against a nearly $200 million production budget, will leave theaters as one of the year’s biggest bombs. “Masters of the Universe” is based on the ’80s Mattel toy and cartoon, and this kind of turnout suggests the movie isn’t expanding beyond the core fanbase of older males.

Which won't include me. Why, who knows if a lot of what they perceive as a fanbase even bothered attending? Obviously, some did, but it would be silly to assume virtually all did unquestioned. This kind of popcorn fare is really no big deal, and some people who played with the toys in the 80s doubtlessly outgrew that kind of stuff long ago. If the film's story does little to prove itself worth watching no matter what age group it's supposedly aimed at, then it's not hard to guess that's another reason why even veteran toy players and cartoon watchers are uninterested.

Now, with that told, there's a certain something else I've learned about the movie from this BBC report that's decidedly troubling, and makes it additionally hard to care it's collapsed financially:

A schoolgirl said it was "great fun" to be "punched" in the stomach by Sir Idris Elba while filming for a Hollywood movie.

At 13, Delilah O'Riordan worked with Tom Hanks in Here (2024). A year later, classmates at her school in Brentwood, Essex, were shocked to see her face on the big screen yet again.

A live action remake of the 1980s cartoon, Masters of the Universe, hit UK cinemas on 5 May.

"My scene was with Idris Elba. In the scene he punched me in the stomach which was great fun. He's really lovely, and I think it was quite surreal," said O'Riordan.

"We did a few practises and he was like making jokes and things so it was really funny.

Seriously, this is sick, even if what's seen on the screen is simulated. It's not something to joke about even in cinematic terms, and that the BBC would make light of stuff like this is despicable.

And then, I also noticed this UK Guardian article written up after the box office results, where they try to make it sound like everything's hunky-dory despite the poor financial receipts:

So why then does everyone involved in this thing seem so cheerful? “Travis Knight and the entire cast and film-making team have delivered something truly special,” Amazon MGM’s Kevin Wilson gushed to Variety. “This opening is exactly the kind of critical first moment that validates our holistic distribution strategy – building awareness and engagement that will carry well beyond the theatrical window.”

Meanwhile, Knight has been talking up the possibility of sequels, after the movie appeared to introduce He-Man’s twin She-Ra in a mid-credits scene. “With every movie that I’ve ever made, I’ve always imagined where the characters go outside … the bounds of the movie,” Knight told TechRadar. “You want to tell a self-contained story, and I think we’ve done that with this movie, but there are things within the wider mythology that didn’t fit within that, and the She-Ra character was one of them.”

“Adora is also a character that carries a lot of weight with her,” he added. “A lot of people, myself included, love that character, so we wanted to give a little nod to where that could go if we were given the opportunity to tell more stories.” [...]

If weak box office no longer kills commercial movies, that may not be the worst thing ever – because Masters of the Universe actually has a bit too much going for it to be a complete dud. The existence of She-Ra really does give the project franchise potential and Knight’s film is enjoyable enough in a nostalgic sort of way. Is the idea that a modern blockbuster can survive on streaming, toys and audience goodwill alone really so terrible?

But even if all this is true, none of it magically turns a $54m opening against a $200m-plus budget into Top Gun: Maverick. A franchise still needs new fans, not just parents revisiting Eternia, and there’s little evidence just yet that Masters of the Universe has actually managed to find them.

So because they might want to spotlight She-Ra in a sequel, that justifies continuing on, despite the failure? Nope, sorry. If they have any intention of making such a sequel woke, that's why it's better, as noted before, if it all came to a halt. Mainly because all these movies based on toy merchandise have long gotten silly, and they really don't add up to escapist entertainment any more than art. I guess it's because the special effects have also long gotten tiresome, as I may have argued before, and that's why when I watch live action, I prefer dramas based on acting talent, or anything of the sort where special effects are kept to a minimum, and animation, again, makes an alternative for sci-fi with better potential. But again, Hollywood won't consider animation, and that's only bringing down variety and competition a lot more.